Amram Musungu is one of two Black men in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a prominent Kenyan organizer of charitable efforts in Utah. He has been influential in bringing many people from Africa who live in Salt Lake City into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Musungu was raised in Hamuyndi, Kenya, located in the western part of the country. He moved to Nairobi at age fourteen and shortly afterward met missionaries from the LDS Church. He was baptized into the LDS Church on June 7, 1992. From 1997 to 1999 Musungu served as a missionary in the Church's Kenya Nairobi Mission, serving much of that time in Tanzania.
After his mission, Musungu came to Utah, where he received a business degree from LDS Business College and a BS degree in accounting from Westminster Colleg. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Utah. Musungu teaches Swahili at Brigham Young University and serves as an advisor to the philanthropic group All One People. In 2006, Musungu received LDS Business College's alumni achievement award.
Musungu founded the Musungu HIV-AIDS Support Organization, which seeks to help the widows and orphans resulting from the ravishes of AIDS in Kenya. He has been the coordinator of Swahili language translation for LDS Church general conferences since 1998 and has been a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir since 2003.
Since coming to Salt Lake City, Musungu has been involved in teaching approximately a hundred Africans about the LDS Church. Between September 2006 and September 2007, thirty of the people Musungu introduced to Mormonism were baptized. Genesis Group mission leader Michael Rice says that Musungu helped bring thirty-five people into the Church during the last six months of 2007.
Most notable among the people Musungu baptized was Noelle Nkoy, a Utah-born child of a father who was raised in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Two years after her baptism, Noelle married Musungu in the Salt Lake Temple on April 15, 2006. Since their marriage, the Musungus have worked together to share Mormonism with many people.
On January 4, 2009, Munsungu was called to be president of the Parleys Creek Branch in the Salt Lake Sugar House Stake, the first Swahili-speaking LDS Church unit created in the United States.
Following is the text of "Mormon and Black: Amram Musungu Is Undeterred," an article by Peggy Fletcher Stack that ran in the Salt Lake Tribune on June 10, 2008:
The first white hand Amram Musungu ever shook belonged to a Mormon missionary.
It was 1992, and the 14-year-old Musungu had come for high school from his home in western Kenya to live with his brothers in Nairobi. He felt an instant kinship with that white boy from America willing to meet him in his own land.
Musungu was a deeply spiritual boy who attended a Pentecostal church throughout his childhood, but when his older sister died, he yearned to know where she was. He felt his pastor offered little solace and few answers.
The Mormon teaching about eternal families gave Musungu the hope he sought. He soon devoured the Book of Mormon, but the thought of baptism terrified him. He had been baptized by immersion once, and his pastor told him if he would die if he were ever baptized again. "But I was ready to die knowing I would see my sister again," Musungu says. "I didn't die, proved the Pentecostal church wrong."
Barely three years later, Musungu was given one day's notice before being called to serve as a full-time missionary in the Kenya Nairobi mission, which included Uganda and Tanzania.
"It taught me that you can go any place the Lord wants you to go," he says. "I plan things out, but Heavenly Father has other ideas. I rely on the [Holy] Spirit to direct my life."
Today, Musungu lives in Utah, with his wife, Noelle Nkoy. He is pursuing a graduate degree in economics at the University of Utah and helped translate the Book of Mormon into Swahili, which he teaches at Brigham Young University.
He is one of only two black men and three black singers in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and spends time preaching Mormonism to African refugees, 35 of whom he baptized in 2007.
Friends, casual acquaintances and even strangers constantly ask him how he could join "that racist church," but Musungu is undeterred.
"Withholding priesthood served God's own purpose. His timetable is different than man's," he says. "I have seen the blessings of the priesthood in my life and many others. It's a good joy."